Full Tilt

by Neal Shusterman

Page 10

 

  The warehouse was huge, at least fifty feet high, with great stone pillars holding up the ceiling and long windows made of hundreds of smaller panes of glass. I could see nothing through those panes, only the sky, casting a cage of shadows on the ground. Yet beyond the windows the sky was changing. The shades of orange spoiled to amber and a sickly yellow, like the skin around an old bruise. If the booth was a turnstile, then I was already on the approach to a new ride, but I didn’t yet know what it was.

  There was a sound now. It was the swish-swish-swish of something slicing back and forth like a pendulum. As I moved around a pile of junk I saw its shadow, huge and ominous, as it rose and fell. Only now did I hear the screams each time it fell. Finally it came into view, a thing strangely out of place within this warehouse.

  It was the swinging boat—the one we had seen when we first entered the park. It was in the form of a three-masted schooner, and it hung from a single axle supported on both sides. It swung forward and back, forward and back, with a rhythm that was both hypnotic and nauseating. This was what the ride looked like from the outside. But from the inside, what would it be? I didn’t have to wait long to find out. The warehouse had sprung a leak. As I leaned against a pillar water ran over my hand. I looked down to see myself standing in a puddle that kept growing deeper, because the water wasn’t just dribbling down the pillar now, it was pouring. Beyond the windows of the huge warehouse an ocean was rising.

  I wanted to keep it out. I wanted to keep everything out: the fact that Cassandra had set her sights on me; that I’d lost Maggie and Russ; that my brother kept spiraling deeper into the rides. . . .

  The windows began to explode inward with the force of the ocean, spilling into the warehouse. A white-water wave rolled behind me, and in front of me was the swinging boat. All my hope rested in the sanctuary of that vessel.

  The water that just a moment ago was at my ankles now rose past my knees, and I could hear the wave roaring behind me. The wave hit me, washing me off my feet. I reached up and managed to hook my arm around one of the support struts holding up the ride. With the icy water at my chest now, the boat crashed down, taking me under. It dragged me along its rough hull, pressing the air out of my lungs, bruising me, and scraping me across barnacles until I couldn’t tell up from down.

  When I finally surfaced, the support struts were gone, the warehouse was gone, but the boat and the waves were still there, much bigger than before. If swimming were not my sport, I would have drowned by now, but even so, it took all my strength to keep my head above the waves. The boat—now a life-size schooner—lurched forward and crashed down over the waves with a motion not all that different from when it had been attached to a greasy axle. Up above, a storm raged in a strange sky the color of dark mustard.

  A rope dangled from the bow, and as the bow plunged I grabbed that rope with both hands, wrapped it around my right leg, and clamped it tightly to the instep of my left foot—just like they taught us in gym class. As the boat rose with the next swell I was lifted out of the water.

  Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe I just weighed less in this weird world, but I was able to pull myself up hand over hand. I clasped the rope to keep from being hurled off each time the ship hit the bottom of a swell, and I used the upward energy to climb faster each time it peaked, until I finally spilled over onto the deck. My lungs were half full of water and my hands were red and raw, but I was still alive and riding.

  The boat pitched beneath me with a regular stomach-churning rhythm, a feeling that just grew worse with each wave. And with each of those waves, the old schooner peaked and I heard voices screaming up above. I looked up to see kids—dozens of them—high above the deck, clinging to the web of ropes that hung from the masts and beams. Ratlines, that’s the word. They swung from the ratlines. Some of them swung from the beams themselves, and others gripped the tattered fragments of the shredding sails.

  You know how when you were little, your dad would throw you up and down in the pool until you were giddy with laughter? I know, because it’s one of the few memories I have of my father. Well, that’s how these riders were. Giddy. But when they fell from their high perches, doing cartwheels into the sea, nobody was there to catch them.

  The schooner crested another wave, the bow rising and plunging again. Up above, the riders squealed with joy. Icy water rolled across the deck, washing me up against the foremast. Then a hairy hand grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me to my feet.

  “What nature a’ fool be ya, boy? Rollin’ around on the deck when there’s work t’be done!” The man’s face was covered by a heavy beard. His voice, somehow familiar, was masked in an accent that was almost but not quite like a pirate’s.

  With his hand still on the collar of my shirt, he hauled me to the railing. “Fix your eyes on the sea and nothing else,” he told me.

  Then I caught something huge out of the corner of my eye, almost the color of the waves. I turned in time to see the tail end of a barnacle-encrusted whale larger than the ship. I was awestruck by the sight.

  “Aye, breach your last to the sun!” the bearded man shouted to the whale. “The hour and thy harpoon are at hand!” The great whale’s fluke cut a wide arc and slipped back into the water.

  Oh no. By now I had a good idea what this ride was.

  A huge wave caught us, the wake of the whale’s breach. It almost washed me away from the railing, but I held on tight. Above us another unfortunate rider plunged into the frothing sea.

  “Drive, drive in your nails, o ye waves. To their uttermost heads, drive them in!” the bearded captain raved.

  I still had the feeling that this ride was neither random nor the manifestation of someone else’s mind. Just as with the carousel, I had a powerful sense that Cassandra had reached inside my mind to create this ride, but I couldn’t figure out why she had chosen this. I never even liked Moby Dick.

  “Ready to lower the boats!” Captain Ahab shouted. “Today we take the great blue whale!”

  “Uh . . . don’t you mean great white whale?”

  “Nay, boy. The blue whale be our quarry on this cursed voyage. The greatest creature on land or sea. She has no teeth to tear a man to shreds like the white whale of which you speak, but she is awesome and daunting prey, nonetheless. ”

  A loud hiss, and I turned to see the great blue whale surface again, spouting spray from its blowhole. Its huge eye was somehow familiar. Its shape, its color. It wasn’t the strange blue of Cassandra’s eyes; this eye was speckled brown. I knew if I had time to think, I’d be able to place where I’d seen such an eye before.

  I watched as the whale opened its tremendous mouth and drew in water. I could see tiny shrimp writhing against the bony lattice in its mouth.

  “See how she opens her mouth to filter life from the sea!” said the captain. “I’d hate to be a krill caught in her baleen. ”

  And all at once it clicked.

  Krill. . . Baleen . . . This was a thought tugged right out of my mind. I took a good, hard look at the maniacal captain, trying to pick the shape of his face out from beneath his heavy beard. “Carl?” Then I looked to the sea, at the submerging whale. “Mom?”

  Carl put his hand on my shoulder. “Keep your wits about you, boy. ”

  “You can’t really be here, right? You’re just some figment of my imagination. Just a part of the ride, right? Right?”

  He just ignored me, looking out to sea for a sign of the whale. “I struck my first whale as a boy harpooner of eighteen. But this one here is the great prize, and beyond her there will be no other. Will you help me, boy?”

  “No! I mean, yes! I mean, I don’t know!”

  The bow crashed down again, and as we rose and crested the next swell I saw a reef off the starboard bow—jagged granite rocks that thrust up through the churning sea like teeth. I could see bits and pieces of other ships in the crevices of the stone monoliths.

  “Follow her into the reef!” shoute
d mad Captain Carl. A sailor at the helm wildly spun the tiller, and the ship turned toward the rocks.

  Up above me the riders still wailed with joy as they swung from the ratlines. One of those voices sounded familiar. It was a shrill whoop that I’d heard so many times, I could place it a mile away. I looked up. In a flash of lightning across the mottled yellow sky, I saw Quinn clinging to the highest of the ratlines, right beneath the crow’s nest. He screamed in defiance of the crashing waves, daring them to shake him loose.

  Fighting the violent pitching of the ship, I climbed the ratlines toward him. I was almost thrown from the ropes, but I held on with what little strength my fingers had left, until I finally reached him high up where the ratlines met the mast.

  “Toward thee I roll,” the mad captain shouted at the whale with my mother’s eyes. “To the last, I grapple with thee!”

  “Quinn!” I could barely hear my own voice over the thunder and wind. I was right next to him now, and still he didn’t know I was there. He just kept whooping as the boat pitched up and down, the motion intensified by the height of the mast. He was oblivious to Carl, our mother the whale, or anything else outside the rush of the ride.

  “Quinn!”

  Finally he turned to me, blinking like he had just come out of a trance. His eyes were wide and wet from the cold wind. “Blake? When did you get here?”

  There was a deafening blast, and a surge of electricity made my arm hairs tingle. A kid on the foremast had been struck by lightning. His smoking body tumbled limply, missing the deck and plunging into the sea. Then I caught sight of one of the passing spires of rock. Part of the stone seemed to melt away, forming a face. In fact, all over the reef, I could swear I saw giant faces in the stone, the wailing mouths and hopeless eyes of those whose lives were given to the ride.

  Lightning sparked in the sky again as I realized we were clinging to the highest point of the boat. Then I looked at Quinn’s moronically metallic face. Dangling chains and rings—all perfect electrical conductors.

  “You’re a lightning rod! You’ve got to get down from here!”

  “No way!” He returned his gaze forward. “I’m not letting you spoil this! It’s the best ride yet!”

  With Quinn, action always speaks louder than words, so I tugged him from the rope net, and we both fell, rolling down the rough ratlines, bouncing painfully off the boom, and landing hard on the deck.

  “This ship’s going down!” I told him, ignoring my aches from the fall.

  “How do you know? You don’t know everything. ”

  “I know the story. One way or another, this ship is going down. ” I looked around for something—anything that would give us an out. Then I caught sight of a strange, unearthly light escaping around the edges of a closed hatch. I knelt down and pulled at the hatch with all my strength. Finally it popped open.

  The light within was too bright. My eyes fought to adjust, and for an instant I got the briefest glimpse of bright chrome gears turning. They were pieces of some colossal gear-work that couldn’t possibly fit in the hold of a ship. This hatch was a doorway to another place entirely!